PAINTING THE NEW WEST

A man came into my studio on a Gallery Stroll evening last year and commented, you really like to paint dirt, don't you. The only answer worse than "yes" would have been "no". Nothing is simple. The stretches of badlands that people ignore as they drive by on their way to somewhere grand are often my subject. Discovering, then pointing out through the act of painting, the beauty that lies hidden just below the surface of the subtle film that covers our eyes, is what engages me. When people think of Contemporary Western Art, they most often think of art that has co-opted the devices of the 20th century avant garde to treat Western themes. Sometimes nostalgic, sometimes ironic, much fine work is being done in that area. But that is not what I am doing. I guess I am painting dirt. The unvarnished present seems to me engaging and beautiful beyond my ability to express it. I look no further. Western landscape painting has focused on the grand vistas, the welcoming comfort of aerable land or the romance of an imagined past. And I do some of that as well. But I want to enlarge the definition of the beautiful that emerged from that aesthetic.